Eric Holmquist joined Customers Bank as Executive Vice President and Chief Risk Officer. Holmquist has more than thirty-five years of financial industry expertise, spanning enterprise risk management, executive reporting, information management programs, and is skilled in creating operational efficiency and risk alignment.
Congratulations to John "JT" Mendoza, one of our 2019 Most Influential People in Security awardees, who is retiring from federal government service after 22 years. He will be joining CGI as Director of Global Security, primarily responsible for establishing a global insider risk management program.
In recent years, Enterprise Risk Management has become increasingly focused on cybersecurity risks. While this focus on cyber is understandable, the current COVID crisis has demonstrated that the unpredictable nature of cascading risks requires viewing risk through a much wider risk aperture. One way forward to successfully navigate this new risk frontier is the establishment of a Risk Operations Center (ROC). The ROC enables enterprise and technology leaders to have the continuous monitoring they require to proactively mitigate all cyber issues. Additionally, it fully supports the CISO/cybersecurity leader's principal responsibilities identified by the HBR survey.
COVID-19 has completely changed our world from six months ago, as we continue to battle the grave health implications, face extended stay at home orders, and grapple with the insurmountable ramifications on our economy. The pandemic has also forever changed the cyber threat landscape, with our workforce becoming more dispersed, and potentially more vulnerable, than ever as organizations switch out of the confines of their offices and move entire data streams to their laptops and home offices. On top of this, Salesforce has announced it is ending its Data Recovery service on July 31st, which is putting all of the data protection responsibilities, and the dire consequences that comes along with it, on the backs of the customer.
To address this current losing war with cyberattackers, the future of cybersecurity requires augmenting the current focus of “indicators of compromise” with “indicators of exposure & warning” in real-time. Where the measure would be to gauge the shift of incident management that would tilt on managing more incidents at warning stages than on compromise stages. It is imperative to build an AI engine to perform this very task as that would be the only way to perform in real-time, scale with the growing nature of cloud as well as to cover the evolving nature to attack scenarios.
As the head of information security for a technology company with more than a thousand (now mostly-remote) employees, the COVID-19 pandemic has been — among other adjectives — an educational experience. And while it hasn’t been completely smooth sailing, I believe one of the reasons we were able to transition so quickly to remote work with relatively few hiccups is that we established practices to withstand precisely this type of scenario long before the virus swept through our community.
Get to know James Carder, CSO at LogRhythm, who has more than 19 years of experience working in corporate IT security and consulting for the Fortune 500 and U.S. Government. At LogRhythm, he develops and maintains the company’s security governance model and risk strategies; protects the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information assets; and oversees both threat and vulnerability management as well as the security operations center (SOC). Carder previously led criminal and national security related investigations at the city, state and federal levels, including those involving the theft of credit card information and Advanced Persistent Threats (APT).
As the financial services industry moves toward an ever-greater dependence on technology, we must always keep an eye on the future to ensure that any new technological advancement or implementation delivers the same, if not better, benefits and risk management capabilities. One emerging area that has garnered a lot of attention in recent years is Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). While DLT holds great promise, there is currently no clear path around how to implement the technology in a way that addresses documented and evolving security risks.
As consumers increasingly turn to online shopping for essential and non-essential goods while at home, fraudsters have adapted their technique to use more sophisticated tactics against consumers, banks and merchants.